Abstract: For eighteen years I was a close associate of novelist-philosopher
Ayn Rand whose books, notably The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged,
inspired a philosophical movement known as objectivism. This philosophy
places its central emphasis on reason, individualism, enlightened self-interest,
political freedom -- and a heroic vision of life's possibilities. Following
an explosive parting of the ways with Ayn Rand in 1968, I have been asked
many times about the nature of our differences. This article is my first
public answer to that question. Although agreeing with many of the values
of the objectivist philosophy and vision, I discuss the consequences of
the absence of an adequate psychology to support this intellectual structure
-- focusing in particular on the destructive moralism of Rand and many
of her followers, a moralism that subtly encourages repression, self-alienation,
and guilt. I offer an explanation of the immense appeal of Ayn Rand's philosophy,
particularly to the young, and suggest some cautionary observations concerning
its adaptation to one's own life.

This article is reprinted from the Journal of Humanistic Psychology,
where it appeared in issue number four of volume twenty-four in the Fall
of 1984 on pages thirty-nine through sixty-four. It is an adaptation of
a speech first delivered at the University of California at San Diego on
May 25, 1982, which is available on cassette
tape.

Background

I was fourteen years old when I read Ayn Rand's novel The Fountainhead
for the first time. It was the most thrilling and emotionally powerful reading
experience of my life. The only rival to that event might be the experience,
some years later, of reading Atlas Shrugged in manuscript.

I wrote Miss Rand a letter in 1949 when I was studying psychology at
UCLA and she was living in San Fernando Valley and was writing Atlas
Shrugged The purpose of my letter was to ask her a number of philosophical
questions suggested to me by The Fountainhead and by her earlier
novel, We The Living. The letter intrigued her; I was invited to
her home for a personal meeting in March, 1950, a month before I turned
twenty.

By that time anyone could read any sentence in The Fountainhead and I
could recite the essence of the sentence immediately preceding as well as
the sentence immediately following. I had absorbed that book more completely
than anything else in my life.

I told Miss Rand that I felt that she had, in effect, brought me up,
long distance, through The Fountainhead. That book was the most important
companion of my adolescent years. We became friends and were associated
for eighteen years -- often in daily contact. I remember, in the first year
of our relationship, when I was twenty years old, that my biggest expense
-- at a time when I was on a very modest allowance -- was my phone bill.
Typically we would talk philosophy on the telephone three or four nights
a week, two or three hours at a time. In those days, thirty or forty dollars
a month for toll calls from Los Angeles to the Valley was a lot of money.

Our relationship went through many stages over the next eighteen years.
It came to an end in the summer of 1968. There was an explosive parting
of the ways. I intend to write about that break one day, but I shall not
concern myself with it here.

From 1958 to 1968, through the Nathaniel Branden Institute in New York
City, I lectured on her philosophy and offered courses on her philosophy
via tape transcription in some eighty other cities throughout North America.
My first book, published in 1962, was Who Is Ayn Rand? It was a study
of her life and work.

Following the break, I moved to Los Angeles, and in my public lectures
in Los Angeles and elsewhere through the country I encountered many people,
admirers of Miss Rand, students of objectivism, who wanted to talk to me
about their own experiences with objectivism as they struggled to apply
Rand's teachings to their own lives. Perhaps because of my break with her,
they now felt freer to speak openly to me than they would have in the past.
Of course they talked of the many benefits they had derived from Rand's
work. But, they also disclosed much suffering, conflict, guilt, and confusion.
At first my almost reflexive response was to think that they had somehow
failed to understand objectivism adequately. But as time went by and I saw
the magnitude of the problem, I realized that answer was not good enough
-- and that I needed to take a fresh look at what the philosophy of Ayn
Rand was saying to people.

This conviction was reinforced by many men and women who came to me for
psychotherapy who were admirers of Ayn Rand. Here again I was exposed to
problems relating to objectivism that cried out for an explanation.

Later as I conducted more lectures and seminars, I met literally thousands
of people around the country who described themselves as students of objectivism
and admirers of Ayn Rand's books, and while I saw the great benefits and
values her work offered to their lives, I also saw the dark side, the difficulties,
the feelings of guilt, confusion and self-alienation that clearly seemed
related, in some way, to the impact of Ayn Rand's work. Perhaps the evidence
had always been there -- I think it was -- only now I was freer to see it
because of my own growth and emancipation.

In discussing Rand's philosophy, there are certain difficulties. One
is the task of separating her basic ideas from her own style of presentation.
She could be abrasive, she could make sweeping generalizations that needed
explanations that she did not provide; she made very little effort to understand
someone else's intellectual context and to build a bridge from their context
to hers.

A further difficulty lies in the fact that she was a novelist and chose
principally to present her philosophy in fiction, the important exceptions
being, of course, her monograph, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology,
and a number of collections of her nonfiction essays, such as The Virtue
of Selfishness. There are some wonderful benefits to be derived from
dramatizing one's ideas in a novel, but there are also hazards. A novel
can be a superb form through which to illustrate a new code of ethics or
morality because one really has the opportunity to show, concretely and
specifically, what one means and what one advocates; one can dramatize one's
ideas through characters, actions, and events -- saying to the reader, in
effect, "This is what I mean." The problem lies in the fact that
a good novelist has to consider many other elements besides philosophical
exposition: drama, pace, exIment, suspense, and so forth. There is no time
for the kind of qualifications -- amendments, exceptions, special cases
-- that slow down the pace. So what we get are broad slashes, sharp-cutting
strokes, which make superb reading and fantastic theatre -- unless
you're sixteen years old, reading this novel and feeling more exId than
you've ever felt in your life, your mind and soul on fire, and taking it
all in as if it were to be read like a philosophical treatise. That's not
how novels are to be read. But you see the problem, especially when reading
a novelist as powerful and hypnotically persuasive as Ayn Rand.

In this article, I cannot provide an overview of Rand's entire system,
let alone discuss each point in detail. I want to discuss here only a few
basic issues, a few broad fundamentals that strike me as particularly important
in terms of their impact on her admirers.

What, in essence, does objectivism teach? What are the fundamentals of
the Ayn Rand philosophy?

Objectivism teaches:

That reality is what it is, that things are what they are, independent
of anyone's beliefs, feelings, judgments or opinions -- that existence
exists, that A is A;

That reason, the faculty that identifies and integrates the material
provided by the various senses, is fully competent, in principle, to understand
the facts of reality;

That any form of irrationalism, supernaturalism, or mysticism, any
claim to a nonsensory, nonrational form of knowledge, is to be rejected;

That a rational code of ethics is possible and is derivable from an
appropriate assessment of the nature of human beings as well as the nature
of reality;

That the standard of the good is not God or the alleged needs of society
but rather "Man's life," that which is objectively required for
man's or woman's life, survival, and well-being;

That a human being is an end in him- or herself, that each one of us
has the right to exist for our own sake, neither sacrificing others to
self nor self to others;

That the principles of justice and respect for individuality autonomy,
and personal rights must replace the principle of sacrifice in human relationships;

That no individual -- and no group -- has the moral right to initiate
the use of force against others;

That force is permissible only in retaliation and only against those
who have initiated its use;

That the organizing principle of a moral society is respect for individual
rights and that the sole appropriate function of government is to act as
guardian and protector of individual rights.

So, Rand was a champion and advocate of reason, self-interest individual
rights, and political and economic freedom. She advocated a total separation
of state and economics, just as -- and for the same reason as -- we now
have the separation of state and church. She took the position, and it is
a position I certainly share, that just as the government has no proper
voice in the religious beliefs or practices of people, provided no one else's
rights are violated, so there should be freedom or production and trade
between and among consenting adults.

Obviously there is a good deal more to her philosophy than this brief
sketch can begin to convey but we are talking here in terms of fundamentals
-- and these are the core ideas at the base of everything else she wrote.

I don't know of any other philosopher who has had her ideas quite so
shamelessly misrepresented in the media. I was fairly young during the early
years of my association with Ayn Rand and objectivism, and seeing this phenomenon
in action was a shocking and dismaying experience. Here was a philosopher
who taught that the highest virtue is thinking -- and she was commonly denounced
as a materialist. Here was a philosopher who taught the supremacy and inviolability
of individual rights -- and she was accused of advocating a dog-eat-dog
world. Here was the most passionate champion in the Twentieth century of
the rights of the individual against the state -- and her statist opponents
smeared her as being a fascist.

It was not a pleasant experience, during my twenties and thirties, to
know the truth of our position and to encounter the incredible distortions
and misrepresentations that so commonly appeared in the press, or to be
present at some event with Miss Rand and later read a summary of what happened
in a magazine that bore almost no relationship to the facts of the occasion.
I suppose, however, it focused and dramatized something I needed to learn
about the world: how low in their priorities is the issue of truth for most
people when issues are involved about which they have strong feelings. Media
people are no worse than anyone else; they merely operate in a more public
area.

Notwithstanding all the smears on Ayn Rand and notwithstanding all the
attacks and the misrepresentations of her ideas and work, her books sold
and continue to sell in the millions. She has always had an especially powerful
appeal to the young. Contrary to what some commentators may have led you
to believe, her most passionate admirers are not to be found among
big business. They are to be found among the young. I must tell you that
in all the years I was associated with her I never saw big business do a
thing to assist or support Ayn Rand in any way. I would say that for most
businessmen her ideas were much too daring, much too radical. She believed
in laissez-faire capitalism. She believed in a free market economy, I mean,
a free free market economy. An economy in which not only were you
to be unencumbered by regulations but so was everyone else. No special favors,
no special protections, franchises, subsidies. No governmental privileges
to help you against your competitors. Often I've had the fantasy of one
day writing an article entitled "Big Business Versus Capitalism."

The benefits

Now what are some of the values that Ayn Rand offers, as a philosopher,
to the many people who have been moved by her work? To begin with, she offered
a comprehensive and intelligible view of the universe, a frame of reference
by means of which we can understand the world. She was a philosophical system
builder who offered a systematic vision of what life on this planet is essentially
about and a vision of human nature and human relationships. And the point
right now is not whether she was right or wrong in all respects of that
vision, but that she had a vision, a highly developed one, one
that seemed to promise comprehensiveness, intelligibility, and clarity --
one that promised answers to a lot of burningly important questions about
life. And human beings long for that.

We humans have a need to feel we understand the world in which we live.
We have a need to make sense out of our experience. We have a need for some
intelligible portrait of who we are as human beings and what our lives are
or should be about. In short, we have a need for a philosophical vision
of reality.

But twentieth-century philosophy has almost totally backed off from the
responsibility of offering such a vision or addressing itself to the kind
of questions human beings struggle with in the course of their existence.
Twentieth-century philosophy typically scorns system building. The problems
to which it addresses itself grow smaller and smaller and more and more
remote from human experience. At their philosophical conferences and conventions,
philosophers explicitly acknowledge that they have nothing of practical
value to offer anyone. This is not my accusation; they announce it themselves.

During the same period of history, the twentieth century, orthodox religion
has lost more and more of its hold over people's minds and lives. It is
perceived as more and more irrelevant. Its demise as a cultural force really
began with the Renaissance and has been declining ever since.

But the need for answers persists. The need for values by which to guide
our lives remains unabated. The hunger for intelligibility is as strong
as it ever was. The world around us is more and more confusing, more and
more frightening; the need to understand it cries out in anguish.

One evidence of this need, today, is the rise of cults, the resurgence
of belief in astrology, pop mysticism, and the popularity of self-appointed
gurus.

We want answers, we want to feel we understand what is going on. If philosophers
are telling us, "Don't even ask, it's naive to imagine that answers
are possible," and if someone at last says to us, "Look no further,
I have the answers, I can tell you, I bring clarity, peace, and serenity,"
it can be very tempting, very appealing and sometimes some of us end up
in bed with the strangest people -- all because of the hunger for answers,
the hunger for intelligibility.

Ayn Rand has an incredible vision to offer -- in many respects a radiantly
rational one. I am convinced that there are errors in that vision and elements
that need to be changed, eliminated, modified, or added and amplified, but
I am also convinced that there is a great deal in her vision that will stand
the test of time.

Her vision is a very uplifting one, it is inspiring. It doesn't tell
you your mind is impotent. It doesn't tell you that you're rotten and powerless.
It doesn't tell you that your life is futile. It doesn't tell you that you
are doomed. It doesn't tell you that your existence is meaningless. It tells
you just the opposite.

It tells you that your main problem is that you have not learned to understand
the nature of your own power and, therefore, of your own possibilities.
It tells you that your mind is and can be efficacious, that you are
competent to understand, that achievement is possible, and that happiness
is possible. It tells you that life is not about dread and defeat and anguish
but about achievement and exaltation.

The message she has brought runs counter not only to the dominant teachings
of religion and philosophy for many centuries past, but, no less important,
it runs counter to the teachings of most of our parents. Our parents, who
said, "So who's happy?"; who said, "Don't get too big for
your britches"; who said, "Pride goeth before a fall"; who
said, "Enjoy yourself while you're young, because when you grow up,
life is not fun, life is grim, life is a burden"; who said, "Adventure
is for the comic strips; real life is learning to make your peace with boredom";
who said, "Life is not about exaltation, life is about duty."

Then, this incredible writer, Ayn Rand, comes along and says, in effect,
"Oh, really?" and then proceeds to create characters who aren't
in the Middle Ages, who aren't running around in outer space, but who are
of our time and of this earth -- who work, struggle, pursue difficult career
goals, fall in love, participate in intensely emotional relationships, and
for whom life is an incredible adventure because they have made it so. Characters
who struggle, who suffer, but who win -- who achieve success and happiness.

So, there is a powerful message of hope in her work. A powerful affirmation
of the possibilities of existence. Her work represents a glorification not
only of the human potential but also of the possibilities of life on earth.

And perhaps that is why her books have had such a powerful impact on
the young, on those still fighting to protect themselves against the world
of adults and against the cynicism and despair of their elders, on those
fighting to hang onto the conviction that they can do better, that they
can rise higher, and that they can make more of their life than those who
have gone before them, especially, perhaps, their parents and relatives.
One cannot understand the appeal of Ayn Rand if one doesn't understand how
starved people -- and especially young people -- are for a celebration of
human efficacy and for a vision that upholds the positive possibilities
of life. The Fountainhead in particular has served as an incredible
source of inspiration for the young. The Fountainhead gave them courage
to fight for their own lives and for their own integrity and for their own
ambitions.

I remember reading letters written by soldiers in World War II who reported
reading sections of the book to one another and finding in it the will to
believe they would survive the horror they were enduring and come back home
and create a better life for themselves. I remember reading letters from
people who spoke of the courage the book gave them to quit their jobs and
enter new careers, when all their friends and relatives opposed them. Or
the courage to leave an unhappy marriage. Or the courage to marry someone
who didn't meet with family approval. The courage to treat their own lives
as important, as worth fighting for.

And what is Atlas Shrugged if it is not a hymn to the glories
of this earth, this world, and the possibilities for happiness and achievement
that exist for us here? What is Atlas Shrugged if it is not a celebration
of the human mind and human efficacy? And isn't this just what the young
so desperately need? And not just the young, but all of us? To be told that
our lives belong to ourselves and that the good is to live them and that
we are here not to endure and to suffer but to enjoy and to prosper -- is
that not an incalculably valuable gift? So these are some of the great benefits
of the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Now let us turn to some of the problems.

The hazards

What I have to say will by no means be exhaustive or comprehensive, but
I do want to touch on just a few issues that strike me as especially important.
I want to share with you what I have observed.

Confusing reason with "the reasonable"

I have said that Ayn Rand was a great champion of reason, a passionate
champion of the human mind -- and a total adversary of any form of irrationalism
or any form of what she called mysticism. I say "of what she called
mysticism," because I do not really think she understood mysticism
very well -- I know she never studied the subject -- and irrationalism and
mysticism are not really synonymous, as they are treated in Atlas Shrugged.
That gets me a little off my track, however. A discussion of mysticism outside
the Randian framework will have to wait for some other occasion. I will
only state for the record that I am not prepared to say, as Rand was, that
anyone who might describe him- or herself as a "mystic" is to
be dismissed as a crackpot or a charlatan.

Reason is at once a faculty and a process of identifying and integrating
the data present or given in awareness. Reason means integration in accordance
with the law of noncontradiction. If you think of it in these terms -- as
a process of noncontradictory integration -- it's difficult to imagine how
anyone could be opposed to it.

Here is the problem: There is a difference between reason as a process
and what any person or any group of people, at any time in history, may
regard as "the reasonable." This is a distinction that very few
people are able to keep clear. We all exist in history, not just in some
timeless vacuum, and probably none of us can entirely escape contemporary
notions of "the reasonable." It's always important to remember
that reason or rationality, on the one hand, and what people may regard
as "the reasonable," on the other hand, don't mean the same thing.

The consequence of failing to make this distinction, and this is markedly
apparent in the case of Ayn Rand, is that if someone disagrees with your
notion of "the reasonable," it can feel very appropriate to accuse
him or her of being "irrational" or "against reason."

If you read her books, or her essays in The Objectivist, or if
you listen to her lectures, you will notice with what frequency and ease
she branded any viewpoint she did not share as not merely mistaken but "irrational"
or "mystical." In other words, anything that challenged her particular
model of reality was not merely wrong but "irrational" and "mystical"
-- to say nothing, of course, of its being "evil," another word
she loved to use with extraordinary frequency.

No doubt every thinker has to be understood, at least in part, in terms
of what the thinker is reacting against, that is, the historical context
in which the thinker's work begins. Ayn Rand was born in Russia: a mystical
country in the very worst sense of the word, a country that never really
passed through the Age of Reason or the Enlightenment in the way that Western
Europe did. Ayn Rand herself was not only a relentless rationalist, she
was profoundly secular, profoundly in love with this world, in a way that
I personally can only applaud. Yet the problem is that she became very quick
on the draw in response to anything that even had the superficial appearance
of irrationalism, by which I mean, of anything that did not fit her particular
understanding of "the reasonable."

With regard to science, this led to an odd kind of scientific conservatism,
a suspicion of novelty, an indifference -- this is only a slight exaggeration
-- to anything more recent than the work of Sir Isaac Newton. I remember
being astonished to hear her say one day, "After all, the theory of
evolution is only a hypothesis." I asked her, "You mean you seriously
doubt that more complex life forms -- including humans -- evolved from less
complex life forms?" She shrugged and responded, "I'm really not
prepared to say," or words to that effect. I do not mean to imply that
she wanted to substitute for the theory of evolution the religious belief
that we are all God's creation; but there was definitely something about
the concept of evolution that made her uncomfortable.

Like many other people, she was enormously opposed to any consideration
of the possible validity of telepathy, ESP, or other psi phenomenon. The
evidence that was accumulating to suggest that there was something here
at least worthy of serious scientific study did not interest her; she did
not feel any obligation to look into the subject; she was convinced it was
all a fraud. It did not fit her model of reality. When an astronaut attempted
during a flight to the moon to conduct a telepathic experiment, she commented
on the effort with scorn -- even the attempt to explore the subject was
contemptible in her opinion. Now I have no wish to argue, in this context,
for or against the reality of nonordinary forms of awareness or any other
related phenomenon. That is not my point. My point is the extent to which
she had a closed mind on the subject, with no interest in discovering for
herself why so many distinguished scientists had become convinced that such
matters are eminently worthy of study.

Another example -- less controversial -- involves hypnosis. I became
interested in hypnosis in 1960. I began reading books on the subject and
mastering the basic principles of the art. Now this generated a problem
because on the one hand Ayn Rand knew, or believed she knew, that hypnosis
was a fraud with no basis in reality; on the other hand, in 1960 Nathaniel
Branden was the closest thing on earth to John Galt. And John Galt could
hardly be dabbling in irrationalism. So this produced some very curious
conversations between us. She was not yet prepared, as she was later, to
announce that I was crazy, corrupt, and depraved. At the same time, she
firmly believed that hypnosis was irrational nonsense. I persevered in my
studies and learned that the human mind was capable of all kinds of processes
beyond what I had previously believed. My efforts to reach Ayn on this subject
were generally futile and I soon abandoned the attempt. And to tell the
truth, during the time I was still with her, I lost some of my enthusiasm
for hypnosis. I regained it after our break and that is when my serious
experimenting in that field began and the real growth of my understanding
of the possibilities of working with altered states of consciousness.

I could give many more examples of how Ayn Rand's particular view of
"the reasonable" became intellectually restrictive. Instead, to
those of you who are her admirers, I will simply say: Do not be in a hurry
to dismiss observations or data as false, irrational, or "mystical,"
because they do not easily fit into your current model of reality. It may
be the case that you need to expand your model. One of the functions of
reason is to alert us to just such a possibility.

It would have been wonderful, given how much many of us respected and
admired Ayn Rand, if she had encouraged us to develop a more open-minded
attitude and to be less attached to a model of reality that might be in
need of revision. But that was not her way. Quite the contrary. Other people's
model of reality might be in need of revision. Never hers. Not in any fundamental
sense. Reason, she was convinced, had established that for all time. In
encouraging among her followers the belief that she enjoyed a monopoly on
reason and the rational, she created for herself a very special kind of
power, the power to fling anyone who disagreed with her about anything into
the abyss of "the irrational" -- and that was a place we were
all naturally eager to avoid.

Encouraging repression

Now let's turn to another very important issue in the Randian philosophy:
the relationship between reason and emotion. Emotions, Rand said again and
again, are not tools of cognition. True enough, they are not. Emotions,
she said, proceed from value judgments, conscious or subconscious, which
they do in the sense that I wrote about in The Psychology of Self-Esteem
and The Disowned Self. Emotions always reflect assessments of one
kind or another, as others besides Rand and myself have pointed out.

We must be guided by our conscious mind, Rand insisted; we must not follow
our emotions blindly. Following our emotions blindly is undesirable and
dangerous: Who can argue with that? Applying the advice to be guided by
our mind isn't always as simple as it sounds. Such counsel does not adequately
deal with the possibility that in a particular situation feelings might
reflect a more correct assessment of reality than conscious beliefs or,
to say the same thing another way, that the subconscious mind might be right
while the conscious mind was mistaken. I can think of many occasions in
my own life when I refused to listen to my feelings and followed instead
my conscious beliefs -- which happened to be wrong -- with disastrous results.
If I had listened to my emotions more carefully, and not been so willing
to ignore and repress them, my thinking -- and my life -- would have advanced
far more satisfactorily.

A clash between mind and emotions is a clash between two assessments,
one of which is conscious, the other might not be. It is not invariably
the case that the conscious assessment is superior to the subconscious one;
that needs to be checked out. The point is not that we follow the voice
of emotion or feeling blindly, it means only that we don't dismiss our feelings
and emotions so quickly; we try to understand what they may be telling us;
we don't simply repress, rather we try to resolve the conflict between reason
and feeling. We strive for harmony, for integration. We don't simply slash
away the pieces of ourselves that don't fit our notion of the good or the
right or the rational.

The solution for people who seem over preoccupied with feelings is not
the renunciation of feelings but rather greater respect for reason, thinking,
and the intellect. What is needed is not a renunciation of emotion but a
better balance between emotion and thinking. Thinking needs to be added
to the situation, emotion does not need to be subtracted from the situation.

Admittedly there are times when we have to act on the best of our conscious
knowledge, and children will pay more attention to our conscious knowledge
and convictions, even when it's hard, even when it does violence to some
of our feelings -- because there is not time to work the problem out. But
those are, in effect, emergency situations. It's not a way of life.

I wrote The Disowned Self to address myself to this problem. In
a way, that book is written in code. On one level, it's a book about the
problem of self-alienation and a deeper discussion of the relationship of
reason and emotion than I had offered in The Psychology of Self-Esteem.
But on another level, it's a book written to my former students at Nathaniel
Branden Institute, an attempt to get them to rethink the ideas about the
relationship of mind and emotion they might have acquired from Ayn Rand
or me, and thereby I hoped to undo some of the harm I might have done in
the past when I shared and advocated Rand's views in this matter. If you
read the book that I wrote with my wife Devers The Romantic Love Question
and Answer Book, you will find that approach carried still further.

In the days of my association with Ayn Rand, we heard over and over again
the accusation that we are against feelings, against emotions. And we would
say in all good faith, "What are you talking about? We celebrate human
passion. All the characters in the novels have powerful emotions, powerful
passions. They feel far more deeply about things than does the average person.
How can you possibly say that we are against feeling and emotion?"

The critics were right. Here is my evidence: When we counsel
parents, we always tell them, in effect: "Remember, your children will
pay more attention to what you do than what you say. No teaching is as powerful
as the teaching of the example. It isn't the sermons you deliver that your
children will remember, but the way you act and live." Now apply that
same principle to fiction, because the analogy fits perfectly. On the one
hand, there are Rand's abstract statements concerning the relationship of
mind and emotion; on the other hand, there is the behavior of her characters,
the way her characters deal with their feelings.

If, in page after page of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged,
you show someone being heroic by ruthlessly setting feelings aside, and
if you show someone being rotten and depraved by, in effect, diving headlong
into his feelings and emotions, and if that is one of your dominant methods
of characterization, repeated again and again, then it doesn't matter what
you profess, in abstract philosophy, about the relationship of reason and
emotion. You have taught people: repress, repress, repress.

If you want to know the means by which they were taught, notwithstanding
all the celebrations of passion in Ayn Rand's books, study the scenes in
The Fountainhead that deal with Roark's way of responding to his
own suffering, study the ruthlessness toward their own feelings and emotions
exhibited by the heroes and heroine of Atlas Shrugged, and study
also consistent way in which villains are characterized in terms of following
their feelings. And understand the power of role models to shape beliefs.

When admirers of Ayn Rand seek my services professionally, they often
come with the secret hope, rarely acknowledged in words, that with Nathaniel
Branden they will at last become the masters of repression needed to fulfill
the dream of becoming an ideal objectivist. When I tell them, usually fairly
early in our relationship, that one of their chief problems is that they
are out of touch with their feelings and emotions, cut off from them and
oblivious, and that they need to learn how to listen more to their inner
signals, to listen to their emotions, they often exhibit a glazed shock
and disorientation. I guess I should admit that seeing their reaction is
a real pleasure to me, one of the special treats of my profession you might
say, and I do hope you will understand that I am acknowledging this with
complete affection and good will and without any intention of sarcasm. The
truth is, seeing their confusion and dismay, that it's hard to keep from
smiling a little.

One of the first things I need to convey to them is that when they deny
and disown their feelings and emotions, they really subvert and sabotage
their ability to think clearly -- because they cut off access to too much
vital information. This is one of my central themes in The Disowned Self.
No one can be integrated, no one can function harmoniously, no one can think
clearly and effectively about the deep issues of life who is oblivious to
the internal signals, manifested as feelings and emotions, rising from within
the organism. My formula for this is: "Feel deeply to think clearly."
It seems, however, to take a long time -- for objectivists and nonobjectivists
alike -- to understand that fully. Most of us have been encouraged to deny
and repress who we are, to disown our feelings, to disown important aspects
of the self, almost from the day we were born. The road back to selfhood
usually entails a good deal of struggle and courage.

I know a lot of men and women who, in the name of idealism, in the name
of lofty beliefs, crucify their bodies, crucify their feelings, and crucify
their emotional life, in order to live up to that which they call their
values. Just like the followers of one religion or another who, absorbed
in some particular vision of what they think human beings can be or should
be, leave the human beings they actually are in a very bad place: a place
of neglect and even damnation. However, and this is a theme I shall return
to later, no one ever grew or evolved by disowning and damning what he or
she is. We can begin to grow only after we have accepted who we are and
what we are and where we are right now. And no one was ever motivated to
rise to glory by the pronouncement that he or she is rotten.

It's often been observed that the Bible says many contradictory things
and so if anyone tries to argue that the Bible holds a particular position,
it's very easy for someone who disagrees to quote conflicting evidence.
It's been said that you can prove almost anything by quoting the Bible.
The situation with Ayn Rand is not entirely different. Right now someone
could quote passages from The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged
that would clearly conflict with and contradict what I am saying about the
messages contained in those works. They would not be wrong, given that the
works contain contradictory messages. Nathaniel Branden of 1960 could quote
lots of passages to dispute at least some of the points I am making here.
He did, too. That doesn't change the fact that if you really study what
the story is saying, if you pay attention to what the actions of the characters
are saying, and if you pay attention to the characterizations, you will
find abundant evidence to support my observation that the work encourages
emotional repression and self-disowning.

Notice further -- and this is especially true of Atlas Shrugged
-- how rarely you find the heroes and heroine talking to each other on a
simple, human level without launching into philosophical sermons, so that
personal experience always ends up being subordinated to philosophical abstractions.
You can find this tendency even in the love scene between Galt and Dagny
in the underground tunnels of Taggart Transcontinental, where we are given
a brief moment of the intimately personal between them, and then, almost
immediately after sexual intimacy, Galt is talking like a philosopher again.
I have reason to believe that Galt has a great many imitators around the
country and it's driving spouses and partners crazy!

The effect of Rand's approach in this area, then, is very often to deepen
her readers' sense of self-alienation. That was obviously not Rand's intention;
nonetheless it is easy enough to show how often it has been the effect of
her work on her admirers -- not only self-alienation, but also alienation
from the world around us. Now it is probably inevitable that any person
who thinks independently will experience some sense of alienation relative
to the modern world. That is not what I am talking about. I am talking about
alienation exalted to the status of a high-level virtue. And how might a
reader draw that inference from Ayn Rand? I will answer in the following
way.

In preparation for this presentation, I re-read the opening chapter of
The Fountainhead. It really is a great book. I noticed something
in the first chapter I never noticed before. Consider these facts: The hero
has just been expelled from school, he is the victim of injustice, he is
misunderstood by virtually everyone, and he himself tends to find other
people puzzling and incomprehensible. He is alone; he has no friends. There
is no one with whom he can share his inner life or values. So far, with
the possible exception of being expelled from school, this could be a fairly
accurate description of the state of the overwhelming majority of adolescents.
There is one big difference: Howard Roark gives no indication of being bothered
by any of it. He is serenely happy within himself. For average teenagers,
this condition is agony. They read The Fountainhead and see this
condition, not as a problem to be solved, but as a condition they must learn
to be happy about -- as Roark is. All done without drugs! What a wish-fulfillment
that would be! What a dream come true! Don't bother learning to understand
anyone. Don't bother working at making yourself better understood. Don't
try to see whether you can close the gap of your alienation from others,
at least from some others, just struggle for Roark's serenity -- which Rand
never tells you how to achieve. This is an example of how The Fountainhead
could be at once a source of great inspiration and a source of great guilt,
for all those who do not know how to reach Roark's state.

In Atlas Shrugged, admittedly, Rand does acknowledge that we are
social beings with legitimate social needs. For many of us, our first introduction
to Ayn Rand's philosophy was through The Fountainhead, and that book
makes an impression not easily lost

Encouraging moralizing

Another aspect of her philosophy that I would like to talk about -- one
of the hazards -- is the appalling moralism that Ayn Rand herself practiced
and that so many of her followers also practice. I don't know of anyone
other than the Church fathers in the Dark Ages who used the word "evil"
quite so often as Ayn Rand.

Of all the accusations of her critics, surely the most ludicrous is the
accusation that Ayn Rand encourages people to do just what they please.
If there's anything in this world Ayn did not do, it was to encourage people
to do what they please. If there is anything she was not, it was an advocate
of hedonism.

She may have taught that "Man's Life" is the standard of morality
and your own life is its purpose, but the path she advocated to the fulfillment
of your life was a severely disciplined one. She left many of her readers
with the clear impression that life is a tightrope and that it is all too
easy to fall off into moral depravity. In other words, on the one hand she
preached a morality of joy, personal happiness, and individual fulfillment;
on the other hand, she was a master at scaring the hell out of you if you
respected and admired her and wanted to apply her philosophy to your own
life.

She used to say to me, "I don't know anything about psychology,
Nathaniel." I wish I had taken her more seriously. She was right; she
knew next to nothing about psychology. What neither of us understood, however,
was how disastrous an omission that is in a philosopher in general and a
moralist in particular. The most devastating single omission in her system
and the one that causes most of the trouble for her followers is the absence
of any real appreciation of human psychology and, more specifically, of
developmental psychology, of how human beings evolve and become what they
are and of how they can change.

So, you are left with this sort of picture of your life. You either choose
to be rational or you don't. You're honest or you're not. You choose the
right values or you don't. You like the kind of art Rand admires or your
soul is in big trouble. For evidence of this last point, read her
essays on esthetics (Rand, 1970). Her followers are left in a dreadful position:
If their responses aren't "the right ones," what are they to do?
How are they to change? No answer from Ayn Rand. Here is the tragedy: Her
followers' own love and admiration for her and her work become turned into
the means of their self-repudiation and self-torture. I have seen a good
deal of that, and it saddens me more than I can say.

Let's suppose a person has done something that he or she knows to be
wrong, immoral, unjust, or unreasonable: instead of acknowledging the wrong,
instead of simply regretting the action and then seeking, compassionately,
to understand why the action was taken and asking where was I coming from?
and what need was I trying in my own twisted way to satisfy? -- instead
of asking such questions, the person is encouraged to brand the behavior
as evil and is given no useful advice on where to go from there. You don't
teach people to be moral by teaching them self-contempt as a virtue.

Enormous importance is attached in Rand's writings to the virtue of justice.
I think one of the most important things she has to say about justice is
that we shouldn't think of justice only in terms of punishing the guilty
but also in terms of rewarding and appreciating the good. I think her emphasis
on this point is enormously important.

To look on the dark side, however, part of her vision of justice is urging
you to instant contempt for anyone who deviates from reason or morality
or what is defined as reason or morality. Errors of knowledge may be forgiven,
she says, but not errors of morality. Even if what people are doing is wrong,
even if errors of morality are involved, even if what people are doing is
irrational, you do not lead people to virtue by contempt. You do not make
people better by telling them they are despicable. It just doesn't work.
It doesn't work when religion tries it and it doesn't work when objectivism
tries it.

If someone has done something so horrendous that you want to tell him
or her that the action is despicable, go ahead. If you want to tell someone
he is a rotten son-of-a-bitch, go ahead. If you want to call someone a scoundrel,
go ahead. I don't deny that there are times when that is a thoroughly appropriate
response. What I do deny is that it is an effective strategy for inspiring
moral change or improvement.

The great, glaring gap in just about all ethical systems of which I have
knowledge, even when many of the particular values and virtues they advocate
may be laudable, is the absence of a technology to assist people in getting
there, an effective means for acquiring these values and virtues, a realistic
path people can follow. That is the great missing step in most religions
and philosophies. And this is where psychology comes in: One of the tasks
of psychology is to provide a technology for facilitating the process of
becoming a rational, moral human being.

You can tell people that it's a virtue to be rational, productive, or
just, but, if they have not already arrived at that stage of awareness and
development on their own, objectivism does not tell them how to get there.
It does tell you you're rotten if you fail to get there.

Ayn Rand admirers come to me and say, "All of her characters are
so ambitious. I'm thirty years old and I don't know what to do with my life.
I don't know what I want to make of myself. I earn a living, I know I could
be better than I am, I know I could be more productive or creative, and
I'm not. I'm rotten. What can I do?" I've heard some version of this
quite often. I've heard it a lot from some very intelligent men and women
who are properly concerned they they have many capacities they are not using,
and who long for something more -- which is healthy and desirable, but the
self-blame and self-hatred is not and it's very, very common.

The question for me is: How come you don't have the motivation to do
more? How come so little seems worth doing? In what way, in what twisted
way, perhaps, might you be trying to take care of yourself by your procrastination,
by your inertia, by your lack of ambition? Let's try to understand what
needs you're struggling to satisfy. Let's try to understand where you're
coming from.

That is an approach I learned only after my break with Ayn Rand. It is
very foreign to the approach I learned in my early years with her. And it's
very foreign to just about every objectivist I've ever met. However, if
we are to assist people to become more self-actualized, that approach is
absolutely essential. We are all of us organisms trying to survive. We are
all of us organisms trying in our own way to use our abilities and capacities
to satisfy our needs. Sometimes the paths we choose are pretty terrible,
and sometimes the consequences are pretty awful for ourselves and others.
Until and unless we are willing to try to understand where people are coming
from, what they are trying to accomplish, and what model of reality they're
operating form -- such that they don't see themselves as having better alternatives,
we cannot assist anyone to reach the moral vision that objectivism holds
as a possibility for human beings.

It's not quite true to say that I didn't understand this until after
my break with Rand. This approach is already present in The Psychology
of Self-Esteem, most of which was written during my years with her.
I will say instead that I learned to practice this approach far more competently
only after the break, only after I disassociated myself from her obsessive
moralism and moralizing.

So here in Ayn Rand's work is an ethical philosophy with a great vision
of human possibilities, but no technology to help people get there, and
a lot of messages encouraging self-condemnation when they fail to get there.

Her readers come to me and they say; "Boy, it was so great. I read
her books and I got rid of the guilt that the Church laid on me. I got rid
of the guilt over sex. Or wanting to make money." "Why have you
come to see me?", I ask. "Well, now I'm guilty about something
else. I'm not as good as John Galt. Sometimes I'm not even sure I'm as good
as Eddie Willers," they respond.

Rand might respond, "But these people are guilty of pretentiousness
and grandiosity!" Sure they are, at least some of the time. Although
when you tell people, as Rand did, that one of the marks of virtue is to
value the perfection of your soul above all things, not your happiness,
not your enjoyment of life, not the joyful fulfillment of your positive
possibilities, but the perfection of your soul, aren't you helping to set
people up for just this kind of nonsense?

A man came to me a little while ago for psychotherapy. He was involved
in a love affair with a woman. He was happy with her. She was happy with
him. But he had a problem; he wasn't convinced she was worthy of him --
he wasn't convinced she was "enough." And why not? Because, although
she worked for a living, her life was not organized around some activity
comparable to building railroads. "She isn't a Dagny Taggart."
The fact that he was happy with her seemed to matter less to him than the
fact that she didn't live up to a certain notion of what the ideal woman
was supposed to be like.

If he had said, "I'm worried about our future because, although
I enjoy her right now, I don't know whether or not there's enough intellectual
stimulation there," that would have been a different question entirely
and a far more understandable one. What was bothering him was not his own
misgivings but a voice inside him, a voice which he identified as the voice
of Ayn Rand, saying "She's not Dagny Taggart." When I began by
gently pointing out to him that he wasn't John Galt, it didn't make him
feel any better -- it made him feel worse!

I recall a story I once read by a psychiatrist, a story about a tribe
that has a rather unusual way of dealing with moral wrongdoers or lawbreakers.
Such a person, when his or her infraction is discovered, is not reproached
or condemned but is brought into the center of the village square -- and
the whole tribe gathers around. Everyone who has ever known this person
since the day he or she was born steps forward, one by one, and talks about
anything and everything good this person has ever been known to have done.
The speakers aren't allowed to exaggerate or make mountains out of molehills;
they have to be realistic, truthful, factual. And the person just sits there,
listening, as one by one people talk about all the good things this person
has done in the course of his or her life. Sometimes, the process takes
several days. When it's over, the person is released and everyone goes home
and there is no discussion of the offense -- and there is almost no repetition
of offenses (Zunin, 1970).

In the objectivist frame of reference there is the assumption, made explicit
in John Galt's speech in Atlas Shrugged, and dramatized throughout
the novel in any number of ways, that the most natural, reasonable, appropriate
response to immoral or wrong behavior is contempt and moral condemnation.
Psychologists know that that response tends to increase the probability
that that kind of behavior will be repeated. This is an example of what
I mean by the difference between a vision of desirable behavior and the
development of an appropriate psychological technology that would inspire
people to practice it.

Conflating sacrifice and benevolence

Now let us move on to still another aspect of the Rand philosophy that
entails a great contribution, on the one hand, and a serious omission, on
the other. I have already stressed that in the objectivist ethics a human
being is regarded as an end in him- or herself and exists properly for his
or her own sake, neither sacrificing self to others nor sacrificing others
to self. The practice of human sacrifice is wrong, said Rand, no matter
by whom it is practiced. She was an advocate of what we may call enlightened
selfishness or enlightened self-interest. Needless to say, this is a viewpoint
that I support unreservedly.

I noted earlier that, when we want to understand a thinker, it's generally
useful to understand what that person may be reacting against. I believe
that in desire to expose the evil of the notion that self-sacrifice is a
virtue and in her indignation at the very idea of treating human beings
as objects of sacrifice, she presented her case for rational self-interest
or rational selfishness in a way that neglected a very important part of
human experience. To be precise, she didn't neglect it totally; but she
did not deal with it adequately, did not give it the attention it deserves.

I am referring to the principle of benevolence, mutual helpfulness and
mutual aid between human beings. I believe it is a virtue to support life.
I believe it is a virtue to assist those who are struggling for life. I
believe it is a virtue to seek to alleviate suffering. None of this entails
the notion of self-sacrifice. I am not saying that we should place the interests
of others above our own. I am not saying that our primary moral obligation
is to alleviate the pain of others. I am not saying that we do not have
the right to place our own interests first. I am saying that the principle
of benevolence and mutual aid is entirely compatible with an ethic of self-interest
and more: An ethic of self-interest logically must advocate the principle
of benevolence and mutual aid.

Given that we live in society, and given that misfortune or tragedy can
strike any one of us, it is clearly in our self-interest to live in a world
in which human beings deal with one another in a spirit of mutual benevolence
and helpfulness. Could anyone seriously argue that the principle of mutual
aid does not have survival value?

I am not talking about "mutual aid" coercively orchestrated
by a government. I am talking about the private, voluntary actions of individual
men and women functioning on their own initiative and by their own standards.
By treating the issue of help to others almost entirely in the context of
self-sacrifice and/or in the context of government coercion, Rand largely
neglects a vast area of human experience to which neither of these considerations
apply. And the consequence for too many of her followers is an obliviousness
to the simple virtues of kindness, generosity, and mutual aid, all of which
clearly and demonstrably have biological utility, meaning: survival value.

There are too many immature, narcissistic individuals whose thinking
stops at the point of hearing that they have no obligation to sacrifice
themselves to others. True enough, they don't. Is there nothing else to
be said on the subject of help to others? I think there is and I think so
precisely on the basis of the objectivist standard of ethics: man's/woman's
life and well-being.

Would you believe that sometimes in therapy clients speak to me with
guilt of their desire to be helpful and kind to others? I am not talking
about manipulative do-gooders. I am talking about persons genuinely motivated
by benevolence and good will, but who wonder whether they are "good
objectivists."

"Have I ever said that charity and help to others is wrong or undesirable?,"
Rand might demand. No, she hasn't; neither has she spoken very much about
their value, beyond declaring that they are not the essence of life -- and
of course they are not the essence of life. They are a part of life, however,
and sometimes an important part of life, and it is misleading to allow for
people to believe otherwise.

Overemphasizing the role of philosophical premises

I have already mentioned that there is one great missing element in the
objectivist system, namely, a theory of psychology, or, more precisely,
an understanding of psychology. Rand held the view that human beings can
be understood exclusively in terms of their premises, that is, in terms
of their basic philosophical beliefs, along with their free will choices.
This view is grossly inadequate to the complexity of the actual facts. It
is, further, a view that flies totally in the face of so much that we know
today about how the mind operates.

Many factors contribute to who we become as human beings: our genes,
our maturation, our unique biological potentials and limitations, our life
experiences and the conclusions we draw from them, the knowledge and information
available to us, and, of course, our premises or philosophical beliefs,
and the thinking we choose to do or not to do. And even this list is an
oversimplification. The truth, is we are far from understanding everything
that goes into shaping the persons we become, and it is arrogant and stupid
to imagine that we do.

Among the many unfortunate consequences of believing that we are the
product only of our premises and that our premises are chiefly the product
of the thinking we have done or failed to do is a powerful inclination,
on the one hand, to regard as immoral anyone who arrives at conclusions
different from our own, and, on the other hand, an inclination to believe
that people who voice the same beliefs as we do are people with whom we
naturally have a lot in common. I remember, at Nathaniel Branden Institute,
seeing people marry on the grounds of believing that a shared enthusiasm
for objectivism was enough to make them compatible; I also remember the
unhappiness that followed. Professing the same philosophical convictions
is hardly enough to guarantee the success of a marriage and not even enough
to guarantee the success of a friendship: Many other psychological factors
are necessary.

Our souls are more than our philosophies -- and certainly more than our
conscious philosophies. Just as we need to know more than a human being's
philosophical beliefs in order to understand that human being; so, we need
to know more than a society's or culture's philosophical beliefs to understand
the events of a given historical period. Of course, the philosophical ideas
of a society or a culture play a powerful role in determining the flow of
events. Other factors, however, are always involved, which one would never
guess from reading Ayn Rand. One factor that many thinkers beside Ayn Rand
tend to ignore in their studies of history are the psychologies or personalities
of the political and military leaders. Different people, with different
psychologies or personalities, at the same moment in history might act differently
-- with profoundly different historical consequences. There is no time here
to explore this theme in detail, beyond saying that the objectivist method
of historical interpretation is guilty of the same gross oversimplification
that is manifest at the level of explaining individual behavior.

One of the unfortunate consequences of this over simplification is that
most students of objectivism are pathetically helpless when faced with the
task of carrying their ideas into the real world and seeking to implement
them. They do not know what to do, most of the time. Objectivism has not
prepared them. There is too much about the real world, about social and
political institutions, and about human psychology, of which they have no
knowledge.

Encouraging dogmatism

Ayn always insisted that her philosophy was an integrated whole, that
it was entirely self-consistent, and that one could not reasonably pick
elements of her philosophy and discard others. In effect, she declared,
"It's all or nothing." Now this is a rather curious view, if you
think about it. What she was saying, translated into simple English, is:
Everything I have to say in the field of philosophy is true, absolutely
true, and therefore any departure necessarily leads you into error. Don't
try to mix your irrational fantasies with my immutable truths. This insistence
turned Ayn Rand's philosophy, for all practical purposes, into dogmatic
religion, and many of her followers chose that path.

The true believers might respond by saying, "How can you call it
dogmatic religion when we can prove every one of Ayn Rand's propositions?!"
My answer to that is, "The hell you can!" Prior to our break,
Ayn Rand credited me with understanding her philosophy better than any other
person alive -- and not merely better, but far better. I know what we were
in a position to prove, I know where the gaps are. And so can anyone else
-- by careful, critical reading. It's not all that difficult or complicated.

This may sound like a trivial example of what I mean, but it's an example
that has always annoyed me personally. I would love to hear some loyal follower
of Ayn Rand try to argue logically and rationally for her belief that no
woman should aspire to be president of the United States. This was one of
Rand's more embarrassing lapses. If we are to champion the independent,
critical mind, then the philosophy of objectivism can hardly be exempt from
judgment. Ayn Rand made mistakes. That merely proves she was human. The
job of her admirers, however, is to be willing to see them and to correct
them.

Sometimes, when her admirers begin to grasp their mistakes, they become
enraged. They turn against everything she had to say. They feel betrayed,
like children who discover that their parents are not omnipotent and omniscient.
That's another hazard to which I'd like to draw your attention.

Ayn Rand might turn over in her grave to hear me say it, but she really
did have the right to be wrong sometimes. No need for us to become hysterical
about it or to behave like petulant eight-year-olds. Growing up means being
able to see our parents realistically. Growing up relative to Ayn Rand means
being able to see her realistically -- to see the greatness and to see the
shortcomings. If we see only the greatness and deny the shortcomings or
if we see only the shortcomings and deny the greatness, we remain blind.

She has so much that is truly marvelous to offer us. So much wisdom,
insight, and inspiration. So much clarification. Let us say "thank
you" for that, acknowledge the errors and mistakes when we see them,
and proceed on our own path -- realizing that, ultimately, each of us has
to make the journey alone, anyway.

Closing

I want to close on a more personal note. I have been asked: Would I be
giving this presentation if Ayn Rand were still alive? Although I can't
answer with certainty, I am inclined to say: No, I wouldn't. I am not an
altruist. I do not believe in practicing self-sacrifice. In view of the
disgraceful lies that she spread about me at the time of our break, in view
of her efforts to destroy me, to ruin my reputation and career -- which
is a story I do not care to get into here -- I would not have wanted to
do anything that would benefit her directly while she was still alive. I
am not that disinterested. I won't deny that, when she was alive, almost
in spite of myself I did do a number of things that directly benefited her;
they seemed necessary at the time. I wasn't too happy about doing them.
One of the things that happened in consequence of her death is that I am
free once again to speak comfortably and openly about what I admire in her
work.